Women’s cricket spotlight
The BCCI Naman Awards celebrated the rise of women’s cricket — with Mithali Raj honoured for lifetime achievement and Smriti Mandhana named among top international performers — underscoring expanding investment, recognition and commercial pathways in the women’s game. That momentum feeds franchise and sponsorship conversations across Indian cricket. (x.com)
The Naman Awards were staged in New Delhi on March 15, 2026, with the ceremony recognising top international, domestic and age‑group performers and felicitating five Indian World Cup‑winning teams. (bcci.tv) The BCCI announced a ₹51 crore cash reward for India’s Women’s World Cup‑winning contingent on November 3, 2025, while the ICC paid the winning side USD 4.48 million in tournament prize money. (bcci.tv) Commercial signals that feed franchise and sponsor conversations were underlined by the Women’s Premier League’s media and franchise deals: Viacom18 paid ₹951 crore for five years of WPL media rights, and the BCCI raised roughly ₹4,669.99 crore from the sale of five WPL franchises. (espncricinfo.com) Franchise activity and sponsorship momentum showed in match‑level outcomes and partner lists this season: Royal Challengers Bengaluru won the WPL final on February 5, 2026, and RCB’s women’s operation carried multiple principal and associate sponsors during the 2026 campaign. (sports.ndtv.com) The BCCI’s published Performance Analyst job brief for the Centre of Excellence lists concrete deliverables that link analytics to awards and selection — data acquisition, coding and mining, video analytics, GPS/wearable integration, statistical modelling and injury‑prediction algorithms — the exact inputs used to quantify season‑by‑season performance. (documents.bcci.tv) Recruitment patterns and actionable portfolio projects that map to the Naman Awards ecosystem: BCCI lists careers openings on its jobs portal while Indian job platforms show hundreds of event‑operations and cricket‑analytics vacancies (indicating entry points such as Event Operations Coordinator, Athlete‑Liaison/Contract Support and Junior Performance Analyst); practical student projects include building a 2024–25 season dashboard using ESPNcricinfo’s StatsGuru and open ball‑by‑ball datasets from Cricsheet or the cricketdata R package to visualise award‑relevant metrics. (bcci.tv)
